Learning for Climate Change Mitigation Finance from Development Assistance

Climate change poses a serious threat to international development. Mitigation of greenhouse gases is therefore a global urgency. The first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol - aimed at the mitigation of greenhouse gases - will end in 2012. The Conference of the Parties (COP) in Copenhagen in late 2009 will be a milestone towards a new post-2012 agreement. Plans for the post-2012 architecture are currently in the making. The ‘financial package' for financing climate change mitigation and adaptation actions is considered an important part of any deal in Copenhagen. Developing countries need to gain access to finance to enable the mitigation of their emissions, adapting to the impacts of climate change and moving forward to become low carbon economies. There is limited concrete information about how climate change mitigation action might be financed.

This project aims to shed light on specific questions of climate change mitigation finance. The project intends to draw lessons from IDS' broad experience of bilateral and multilateral development assistance and provide evidence on the different options for how such money could be effectively channelled towards developing countries. This is based on the assumption that climate change mitigation finance can learn from financing experiences in other development sectors. This project will particularly evaluate the issues of donors/funders, recipients and implementing institutions in developing countries; reporting requirements and the link between deliverables and funding.